


Ideal

by Clementine19



Category: The Last of Us (Video Games)
Genre: F/M, PWP, idealistic idiots falling for each other, not beta'd we die like men etc, preposterous energy for apocalypse survivors
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-10
Updated: 2020-09-10
Packaged: 2021-03-07 00:02:12
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,692
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26397598
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Clementine19/pseuds/Clementine19
Summary: Extrinsic from all my Joel content but hey, theother Milleris just a different type of pretty and could respectfully get it, thanks.Canon leaves Firefly-Tommy pretty open, so I'm electing to believe his idealism saw Marlene's idealism and they mutually went oh, no, they're hot.
Relationships: Tommy/Marlene
Comments: 4
Kudos: 6





	Ideal

**Author's Note:**

> Lemme know if you want round 2 of this night! They deserve it, honestly.

Tommy hisses as he lies back against the heap of clothing, cradling a sleeve stiff with the dried blood injured arm beneath.

Marlene paces, hands on her hips in her particular way, the way that said she would be more at ease with her hand on her gun.

Tommy laughs, initially a low chuckle that blooms into a lopsided grin.

“Fucking what, Tommy?” Marlene snaps, irritable and on edge from the night they’d had so far.

Tommy gestures infuriatingly at her whole person, like it explains it, smile not fading. Marlene narrows her eyes to a squint, sizing him up like she’s going to shiv him if he so much as giggles.

“This is a bad situation. We are in a bad situation, because it is snowing, this place is fucking freezing, and you’re laughing,” Marlene lists, gesturing to his splayed legs like they’d particularly offended her.

He adopts a serious face.

“Yes ma’am.”

Marlene gives him an inscrutable look, seeming to take each of his features in one at a time before registering his whole expression.

“C’mon. We’ll be able to get out in the morning. Sure as shit no infected busying themselves with all this,” Tommy encourages, always optimistic. Always a calm different than the edge of control Joel seemed to hold. When Tommy wanted to be at ease, he could still summon it in little bursts. Marlene has been noticing this quality, and how readily he shared it, and biting her own lip to stop noticing it.

Suddenly though, his face darkens.

“Jesus, fine,” he grouses, moving his hands like he’s swatting away a fly.

“Okay, listen,” Marlene gets his attention back.

Tommy looks around as if to indicate his lack of choice.

Marlene pinches the bridge of her nose and looks up at the ceiling like she’s stemming a nosebleed.

“I’m ‘bein’ weird’ because I’m remarkably attracted to you and it is distracting me,” she grits out, like she’s reading off a list. Earlier, he’d thought he murmured the “bein’ weird” comment to himself.

Tommy looks blankly at her and scoffs.

“Fuck, no need to go to that kind of fuss, you can just say it’s a Firefly secret without the theater,” he rumbles.

Yeah, Joel caught him looking and gave him a good-humored nudge earlier in the week. Maybe a few times that week. He didn’t want to fuck this up, so he sat on his hands and overcorrected when he’d slip into flirting with her. He’d gotten intense looks in return, but never the laugh he was hoping to elicit, so he shrugged and assumed she wasn’t noticing or wasn’t interested.

“Hey,” Marlene says, soft offense in her voice. “I’d tell you, if it was that. It’s yours to know, too.” She toys with her pendant, the room incredibly tiny to her now.

Tommy’s eyes widen and he gets to his feet, taking the time afforded by the motion to figure out what to say.

He gestures to himself again, lingering on the blood stains on his shirt, poking the small bun his hair was in, the multiple holsters on his legs. He furrows his brows and raises one as if to ask “you sure?”

Marlene fidgets with her coat, rolling her eyes and trying very hard to look at his eyes.

When her sightline clearly goes to his mouth, Tommy closes the distance and kisses her. He’s gentle, seeming to consider the right way to approach it, but his hand on the back of her neck is firm and makes her shiver. Marlene’s hands fly up to his hair, working her fingers in and dismantling the tie carefully holding his shaggy winter-long hair back.

Tommy advances until Marlene is pinned against the table behind her, each drawing back to catch their breath in the wake of their bodies aligning fully.

“The balls on you to start the night stuck in a storm like that, if you were wrong,” Tommy mumbles against her mouth, getting swatted in the chest for it.

“Texas? Shut up,” Marlene says frankly, nipping his lower lip and going for his coat purposefully.

“Yes ma’am,” he replies, shrugging out of it willingly and kissing her with both hands on either side of her face. She’s nearly a foot shorter than him but all animated, electric force, and he wants to rise to meet her.

Marlene presses her tongue into his mouth and he outright moans. Whether it’s just been too long or his crush being consummated was really that good wasn’t something he could say in the moment.

Tommy’s hands traipse over her body, tugging at layers as he goes to get closer as she does the same. He gets enough of a hold on her tongue to suck it, hard, at the same time he gets one hand under her shirt.

A little gasp and a quiet _fuck, Tommy_ and Marlene pulls back, breathing hard and meeting his eyes.

“This isn’t stupid, right?” she asks with sincerity. Tommy looks at her dumbly, flushed across his high cheekbones, spectacularly hard and now very confused.

“I’d uh, prefer it _bein’ weird_ tomorrow over you stayin’ quiet any longer,” he echoes her earlier words and shifts, hands not fully off of her. His pupils are huge, but he clears his throat and steps back respectfully.

“Not gonna go tellin’ anyone, if that’s it,” he adds, hearing himself near-whine.

“I haven’t had a lot of _normal,_ I’m sorry. I really like you,” Marlene is the most open he’s ever seen her, voice low. He could listen to the woman talk for hours, might honestly be enough after a few minutes the way his heart hammered now.

“I really like you. Dunno ‘bout normal, but I’d like to kiss you now and continue doin’ so later,” he replies quietly, pulling closer to her again and palming her jaw.

Marlene fists a hand in his shirt and crushes their mouths together. Tommy lets her lead him a moment before pulling back again. Marlene grunts in frustration at him, thinking they’d gotten everything out of the way.

“Just don’t want to shoot you,” he explains, disarming and laying out weapons on the shelf in what he was realizing now was a stand-alone guest house. Marlene’s quick tension melts into a laugh as he smiles at her, pretty blue eyes sparkling.

_Fuck, that’s going to be hard to ignore around the others_ , she thinks. Then again, he’d passed the difficult to ignore threshold weeks ago when Luce had shoulder-checked her for incautiously staring at all of him as he walked away. Marlene spent the rest of the day thinking about the breadth of his shoulders every time she’d had a moment to collect her thoughts between issuing orders and keeping a frequently hobbled organization alive, to her extreme chagrin.

Tommy eyes her impatiently as she does the same, unclasping a holster replete with a row of shivs and tossing it aside. He quirks a smile, familiar with her usual arms, but still finding it endearing as hell in this new context. Endearing for a woman orchestrating an insurgent group; endearing for a woman whose proud thrust of the chin made his spine stiffen before he realized the full extent of why. He’d not noticed she was a full head shorter than him before, never felt relevant. Until, tonight, he was relieved of the burden to avoid thinking of ways to please them both.

She barely has time to toss it aside before his hands reach her thighs and haul her up onto the table. Marlene smiles bigger than he’s seen, and it’s almost a shame to cover her mouth with his until he feels her.

Marlene strokes the roof of his mouth pointedly and he leans his weight into her to avoid his knees buckling. Tommy kisses her back with just as much need, yanking her sweatshirt’s metal zipper down so hastily it’s slightly warmed as it goes.

Meanwhile, Marlene gets through his shirt’s buttons with no problem, finding him cooperative in shrugging one shoulder and arm free. She pauses carefully when she gets to his injured arm, looking up at him for permission to finish removing it, irrespective of her ankles locked behind his hips already.

Tommy burrows his forehead into her opposite shoulder, kissing along her clavicle and tugging her shirt to expose the top of her back. Marlene efficiently removes the fabric, avoiding too much contact.

“Tommy, I need to wrap this,” she murmurs into his hair.

“Hmm?” he looks up at her like he hadn’t torn himself open while prone on a broken patch of floor enough to need stitches.

“Let me,” she untwines her legs, Tommy almost pouting, shifting his belt to accommodate the loss of friction.

“Here,” she identifies a packaged sponge from a shelf nearby—close enough to sterile—and tears the bloodied end off of Tommy’s shirt. He watches her with consuming focus, eyes on her neat eyebrows, gorgeous lips…not wincing as she tugs the makeshift bandage tight. Without taking his eyes off of hers, this woman that made him think hope was even conceptually in his grasp, he thinks it _might_ hold through the night.

Marlene looks back up at him when she’s done, and Tommy doesn’t bother to inspect her work, kissing her and pushing her right back where they were on the table. She likes watching him move, and more now, loves the feel of it. His stomach is all wonderful cords of muscle between her thighs, and his callused hands stretch and flex over her abdomen, begging their way higher.

He catches both nipples in his index and thumbs and she bites his lower lip in instant reciprocation, fingers at his belt. Tommy pulls her shirt off without patience, bra following once he accepts that there’s no clasp and it has to go over her head. He runs his fingertips down the length of one leg appreciatively. Marlene adores his complete lack of focus—he’s fully with her, taking the chance to feel everything he can as its presented. She wants to do the same to him.

Tommy grunts in irritation when his fingers find the top of her hiking boots, realizing they both still have boots on and they’d have to pull apart again. He kneels and sits back on his heels, pants open, and pulls one boot into his lap, tearing at the laces. Marlene watches him appreciatively, something remarkably sweet about and absolutely unnecessary—he can absolutely just bend her over the table, now—but he finishes quickly.

“C’mere,” she reaches out to him, intending to be polite. She tugs off her boots with practiced ease, dropping them to the floor.

Tommy steps towards her, jerking one boot off with one hand in a practiced separating of his laces, toeing it with his other foot. He repeats it and doesn’t return to her waist, instead snatching at both ankles and pulling her jeans away in one motion before moving between her knees. Marlene inches close to him, first knuckles hooked greedily in his pants and tugging him closer.

He takes to one knee, urging her leg over his shoulder and kissing her thigh before resting his head on it and giving her a pointed look. Marlene nods, sighing into the warm oscillation of his fingers outside her underwear. He sucks her through them, pulling her lips into his mouth and causing her to jump.

“Fuck!” she hisses, tilting her hips and wriggling closer to the sensation. Tommy hooks his thumb inside and draws them to one side, tongue following closely along his path.

He works slowly, appreciatively, pretty blue eyes watching her face as he slips his tongue just past her entrance. Marlene sighs and shakes, dropping her knee over his shoulder. He huffs a laugh through his ministrations and laps at her openly, bringing his fingers up to stroke her, trying just one at first.

“Tommy—” Marlene starts, temporarily distracted by his fingers finding the right spot to press on all of her nerves, “please, please,” she finishes weakly, losing her train of thought.

Tommy rises suddenly, fingers still playing at her, curling inward once he worked them in fully.

“I’m not planning on stoppin’ tonight,” Tommy starts, cut off by Marlene kissing him again, voracious. He was starting to notice how determined she looked before she’d lunge in at him, and it turned up the corners of his mouth to be the target of it.

_Fuck it,_ Tommy thinks, getting his cock free and lining up to her, reciprocating her kisses all the while. He tries to pull back, ever careful and more mindful this far into the apocalypse to not compromise anyone’s ability to dead-sprint. Marlene scratches the nape of his neck as she tugs his hair, anchoring him back and gripping his shaft to guide him in. They moan together, open-mouthed and adjusting to the angle and each other.

Tommy grips her hips and thrusts a little erratically, hilariously close. Marlene holds onto him, the sensation and stretch of him making her mouth fall open with soft sounds in his ear.

“Get on your back, Miller,” Marlene hisses, nipping his ear.

Barely slowing his pace, Tommy looks amused, then comprehending, then stirred up. He pulls out, breathing hard, and does what he’s told. Marlene strips off her remaining layers before making her way over to him, a nest of their clothing slowly accumulating where he leaned back on his hands.

Tommy’s throat goes dry—she’s scarred from things he witnessed. Composure and strength radiates off of her. He sits forward involuntarily, getting kicked gently in the chest for it. Unlike the relatively well-behaved Southern girls in his past, Marlene wasn’t looking to him to lead the whole time. That, and the intensity of trust between them made him like an animal showing its neck to a superior. His back flattens to the ground as Marlene straddles him, wasting no time to tease him.

Tommy arcs until the top of his skull almost touches the floor behind him, the way she rolls her hips and rides him sincerely unprecedented.

“Marlene—” he groans, reaching for her face, wanting her closer, as good as being fucked into the ground feels.

She gives him a warm conspiratorial smile, hands that should be bracing against him actually just taking the opportunity to feel up what she’d suspected was so nice for months. She rolls her head back, chin tipped up and long neck before him. Tommy fans his fingers over her throat, down her sternum, over her abdomen, mouth open with rapt attention.

Marlene cries out, freezing and shivering above him, hips pounding against him every few seconds like it was beyond her control. The way she clenches down on him and rolls her hips combined with her moving above him, sweat beginning to bead—Tommy surges up and captures her mouth.

Once she begins to slacken with the rush of bliss, Tommy slams her down onto him with his hands digging into her ass, hard enough to bruise. It’s less strokes than he’d admit before he urges her of off him and comes with a shout onto his own chest, Marlene’s hand joining his through it. She kisses him through his peak, lamenting that they can’t just come for each other completely tangled up. Tommy leans into her even as she pulls back for a breath, full of need for her.

The chill of their surroundings takes back over as they come down together over minutes, mouths sliding over each others’ lazily, Tommy holding them up, Marlene’s hands in his hair. He trails one hand down to graze her ass, sucking the tip of her tongue as he does. Marlene makes a small surprised sound.

Against her mouth, Tommy murmurs, “I’m completely ready to see what this is about,” smiling up at her with his eyes sparkling as he gives her a lewd squeeze. Marlene silently reaches for his tossed shirt, pulling it around herself to fend off the cold.

She piques an eyebrow with intent, still breathing deeply and reaching to finish getting him undressed as he leans up to her again.

**Author's Note:**

> Maybe I'll poke at the aftermath of TLOU & the "What'd you do, Joel?" scene—how's Tommy going to cope with those details? 
> 
> If we all like to suffer, leave me a comment! Feed me endorphins/cue me to write the thing. 
> 
> Catch me over at [ the ol' tumbs](https://joelmillerthirstqz.tumblr.com/)


End file.
